Consider the following observations on the state of affairs in the contemporary
Arab world :

The history of the modern Arab world – with all its political failures,
its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing
production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development – is disfigured by a whole series of out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never
suffered and that the holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the
Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much – far too much – currency;

….[T]o support Roger Garaudy, the French writer convicted earlier this year
on charges of holocaust denial, in the name of ‘freedom of opinion’ is a silly
ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s
eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical
misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder
for freedom of opinions in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be
told, that scarcely exists?

It takes considerable courage for an Arab to write self-criticism of this kind,
indeed, without the personal pronoun ‘we’ how many would have guessed that an
Arab, let alone Edward Said himself, had written it? And yet, ironically, what
makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims, and particularly criticism of
Islam in the West very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward
Said’s Orientalism. The latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs
the art of self-pity – “were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists
and Zionists, we would be great once more” – encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist
generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam,
and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings
might offend Muslims sensibilities, and who dared not risk being labelled “orientalist”.
The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called “intellectual
terrorism,” since it does not seek to convince by arguments or historical
analysis but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, Eurocentrism, from
a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him.
The moral high ground is an essential element in Said’s tactics; since he believes
his position is morally unimpeachable, Said obviously thinks it justifies him
in using any means possible to defend it, including the distortion of the views
of eminent scholars, interpreting intellectual and political history in a highly
tendentious way, in short twisting the truth. But in any case, he does not believe
in the “truth”.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me, at least. It sounds all too much like the way Priyamvada Gopal wrote in her inaccurate and at times abusive article about the protest against gender segregation, and even more like the crude echo of it that Laurie Penny wrote a few days later. It also sounds like the way both Gopal and Penny have reacted to criticism. Penny did listen to some of it, and did slightly amend one paragraph in her article, but she ignored the rest, and left (for one thing) the grossly inaccurate claim about the Student Rights report uncorrected, so there it still sits. Gopal didn’t even do that much, and she’s still flinging around complaints about “liberals” with assorted epithets attached. They both clearly think they occupy the moral high ground, and their thinking that seems to make them unable to argue reasonably.

This wouldn’t matter if it weren’t such an influential idea – “Orientalism” – but it is, so it does.

Comments

Well, actually Said was known to criticise certain representations of ‘the West’ that went on in Arab-language media. Said’s regular columns in Al-Ahram were notable for just this trait. So this depiction of him as a West-hating lunatic misses the mark a lot. I’m not a big fan of Said’s Orientalism, but you really need to read the text yourself rather than relying on clowns like Ibn Warraq for accurate criticisms. Hitchens’ critique misses the mark even more. If you want a better critique of Said, read Aijaz Ahmad – In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.

To be fair—Said was bothered by the use to which some of his supporters put Orientalism. But the book was riddled with so many contradictions and inaccuracies (noted by many critics) that is was easy for any of his audience to pull out of it whatever their agenda dictated–or inspire whatever agenda they wanted. That doesn’t mean that Said was entirely free of sloppy or inaccurate thinking (as amply displayed in his book)–but he shouldn’t be completely identified with all of his supporters.

Apart from Ahmad’s critique noted by the former poster, another important critique of Orientalism is:

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (published in the US as Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents) by Robert Irwin.

Irwin pronounces Said a “fraud”–which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, as “fraud” connotes a “willful or consciously made deceit”. I am not sure that Said set out purposely to deceive. He seems to me to have actually believed in what he wrote. The problem, I think, is more one of a deficiency on his part in understanding and analyzing what he chose to write about. Many of his supporters were no less deficient.

Interesting. I had never even heard of Ibn Warraq until now, which probably is a damning commentary on how ‘welcome’ his views are in the mainstream and left media. Now I want to go buy one of his books. Maybe it will help me forget everyone to the left of Fox News slobbering all over a shallow, self-serving joke like Reza Aslan this year.

In truth, Warraq started with a degree of sincerity. But he’s now gone full blown hard right-wing polemicist. To demonstrate his commitment to freedom of speech and worship, he proposes a referendum on boarding up all mosques in the West till the US-backed Saudi monarchy permits the construction of churches in the kingdom. He says we must outlaw the hijab and stop all Muslim immigration. It is not clear whether he thinks the ban on migration from Islamic states ought to extend to himself or whether he will, for the sake of practicing what he preaches, hop on the next flight back to Pakistan.

Also, he says that, in the fashion of the ten year war in Iraq, we must pursue “regime change” in Iran. That’s right, we need to bomb those Iranians to freedom!!!! Presumably, Ibn will be on his way to the nearest recruiting office soon.

I’ve not read Orientalism, but after reading Ibn Warraq’s essay I can’t really agree with either of them all the way (at least with regard to what was quoted in the essay) and frankly Warraq’s critique does seem a bit strained at times.

Like when he takes Said to task for his “self pity” which he seems to object to since he says Said is a tenured professor at Columbia. Two things: 1) And? It’s Said’s lived experience. Would Warraq take for instance Henry Louis Gates to task in a similar fashion? 2) Notwithstanding the above, Said wrote the passage he references in a book written in 1978. Well I checked wikipedia and Said became professor at Columbia in 1991. So methinks Said hadn’t quite reached tenured status at Columbia when said line was written.

Also, this part I am just confused: I hope he’s not saying that Freud or “vulgar Marxists” are somehow “not Western”:

The golden thread running through Western civilization is rationalism. As Aristotle
said, Man by nature strives to know. This striving for knowledge results in
science, which is but the application of reason. Intellectual inquisitiveness
is one of the hall marks of Western civilisation.

Vulgar Marxists, Freudians, and Anti-Imperialists, who crudely reduce all human
activities to money, sex, and power respectively, have difficulties in understanding
the very notion of disinterested intellectual inquiry, knowledge for knowledge’s
sake.

I read Orientalism and Said is basically guilty of Occidentalism: he reduces the Western literary canon to a handful of writers, cherry picks a few quotes that ‘prove’ his thesis, and generally portrays the West as a monolithic bloc undifferentiated by class, politics, ethnicity or gender.

I’m not interested so much in his supposed self-pity, self-hatred, or whatever: they have no bearing on the ‘truth’ of his claims. It’s much more relevent that he confabulates an entire ‘West’ united by an obsession with Othering the ‘East’.

Also, this part I am just confused: I hope he’s not saying that Freud or “vulgar Marxists” are somehow “not Western”

That’s not what he’s saying, he’s saying they’re not part of the Western tradition of rational thought dating back to Aristotle. He’s certainly not saying they’re ‘Eastern’ – though Marxism survived longer in the East and was particularly brutal.

As to Freud it’s about time his ‘theories’ were treated with the same horrified derision as eugenesists.

It’s notable that psychoanalysis – Freud and Lacan – still dominates the ‘treatment’ of autistics in France and French clinicians defend their practice against effective behaviourist and cognitive treatments in precisely the same ‘anti-colonialist’ terms used to defend gender apartheid: science based psychiatry being deemed ‘foreign’ and ‘imperialistic’.

The result is that ‘crocodile’ and/or ‘refrigerator’ mothers are blamed for their children’s autism, non-verbal autistic children are subjected to ‘talking cures’, forced to play naked with each other or suffocated to death under wet blankets.

On the other hand I know people who think Said is a minor god, so I like IW’s thoroughly opposing view. Bad of me, no doubt.

The problem is to criticise even a minor god is heresy. How often do we see Said’s work critiqued – or even ignored? Debate about the East are conducted entirely on Saidian grounds – even Marxists set economics aside.

Opehlia, thank you for the suggestion on which book to explore. I wanted to address one point you raise.

In particular I don’t like this business of treating reason etc as purely “Western”; I think it’s both silly and ill-advised.

Without having read Warraq in depth, please allow me to make a general defense of that view.

Reason as a capacity is a universal human ability. Anyone can apply reason to a given problem if they elect to do so, without being aware of it as a distinct philosophy. However, “Reason” as in a systematic philosophy of rationalism, logic, and evidence-based thought, etc. arose as a distinctly European phenomenon. I would suggest Warraq is giving credit where credit is due.

I admit I am not an expert on the history of philosophy, but I cannot think of any comparable articulation of Reason in a non-European society. It may exist, and please feel free to offer an example, but it certainly never gained any prominence as in Europe.

Admittedly I view this from my seething dislike of Confucianism and the horrible misogynistic values it has sewn into Korean culture. Confucianism has elements of reasoned analysis in it, but they are undone by the ultimate deference to tradition and hierarchy.

Obviously there are people applying Reason in cultures all around the world, but they are ultimately operating in the European tradition at this point. I think that is a very harsh pill to swallow in a climate where a sense of grievance over colonialism and imperialism is stoked regularly by non-Western tribalists and nationalists, as well as Western leftists.

And let’s be honest European cultural self-assertiveness is considered very poor form, especially if the person is white. It is ironically easier for non-white Western liberals like myself or Mr. Warraq or Francis Fukuyama to articulate an unpopular truth, because we are not expected to show guilt over past cultural imperialism, and by virtue of being in the West, are not going to run afoul of anti-Western nationalism.

Arguably, Western rationalist thought didn’t really exist in it’s current form until Francis Bacon introduced the scientific method so that ideas could be tested against reality.

I’m reading Jim Al-Khalili’s Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science which makes the case the Baconian method was anticipated earlier by the Iraqi scientist Ibn al-Haytham – which means it isn’t uniquely ‘Western’ at all.

The ‘anti-rationalist’ East is largely a modern invention of theocrats.

If you re-read my comment, I never said it was “uniquely” Western. What I said is that Western Europe was alone in actually developing rational thought into a systemic philosophy of influence.

It is fair to say that Ibn al-Haytham’s longterm influence on Arab and Muslim culture was virtually (and tragically) nil, like several other Muslim scholars. They ironically had meaningful influence only outside the Muslim world.

Also part of the uniquely European story is the confluence of reason with democracy and secularism. No other society has a parallel phenomenon until the 19th Century with the Meiji Restoration.

The ‘anti-rationalist’ East is largely a modern invention of theocrats.

Sorry but any society that promotes the circular-reasoning of tradition and religious revelation as a basis for law, material advances, etc. is anti-rationalist to some degree. China or Japan could have beaten Europe to the New World and changed human history, but instead they both gave in to irrational, hubristic isolationism. The Muslim world did largely the same thing as Neil Degrasse Tyson has discussed. Science threatened Islam and Islam nipped it in the bud.

If you re-read my comment, I never said it was “uniquely” Western. What I said is that Western Europe was alone in actually developing rational thought into a systemic philosophy of influence.

‘Anti-rationalism’ is a reaction against rationalism: it takes place against a background of rationalism. It is turning back the clock.

Irrationalism existed prior to rationalism.

Obviously there are people applying Reason in cultures all around the world, but they are ultimately operating in the European tradition at this point.

Ah, right: so it’s impossible to give counter examples of people applying Reason (capital R) in other cultures to disprove your assertion that Reason is European – because Reason is European so anyone applying Reason must be behaving in a European manner and not being authentic to their own culture.

Science threatened Islam and Islam nipped it in the bud.

If by ‘nipping it in the bud’ you mean after 700 years of scientific progress’ I’d agree.

Ah, right: so it’s impossible to give counter examples of people applying Reason (capital R) in other cultures to disprove your assertion that Reason is European – because Reason is European so anyone applying Reason must be behaving in a European manner and not being authentic to their own culture.

You do not get credit for re-inventing the wheel when you already know about it.

As soon as the world began to gloablize in the 15th century, the chance of independent, parallel invention became less and less. Maybe some minimally contacted tribe left in Amazonia or New Guinea will invent writing, philosophy, and all the steps leading to Reason, but forgive me if I do not hold my breath in anticipation.

Like I said, I realize that being positive and assertive about European history is considered poor form. If it were “authentic to their own culture” then they would have developed Reason independently.

If by ‘nipping it in the bud’ you mean after 700 years of scientific progress’ I’d agree.

You can’t deny that the Islamic power structure ended science and it had no demonstrable influence on the society in the long run, so you pick at my words. I totally dispute the “700 years” claim too.